Review of IPVanish VPN

Published on Sep 2nd, 2017

IPVanish is a US-based company that offers a high level of anonymity to its subscribers. With a truly international service, IPVanish has servers in 41 countries, including India, North Africa and the Far East. When we tested the software, we found it to perform quite well, providing an impressive experience that had a very professional feel. If there is one thing that we are not pleased with when it comes to IPVanish, it is their retention of subscribers’ email addresses for marketing purposes. That said, addresses are not sold, but used by the company for self promotion.

Pricing Tiers

Like many other VPN providers, IPVanish offers one package with a variety of payment options. Users realize a cost savings when they sign up for several months or a year. IPVanish offers additional savings from time-to-time that users should be on the lookout for. Currently, IPVanish prices are:

Monthly – $10.00

3 Months – $26.99 ($8.99 per month)

Yearly – $77.99 ($6.49 per month)

The package offered by IPVanish includes your choice of L2TP, PPTP and OpenVPN protocols. You also get unlimited bandwidth, a choice of more than 90 servers in 41 different countries, 3500-plus IP addresses, and both UDP and TCP versions of OpenVPN. There is no free trial offered by the company, but there is a seven-day money back guarantee.

Customer Support

Customer support is not available around the clock, and this could be a deal breaker for some. You can contact support during normal business hours (EST). Email and chat are both available for customers. Upon contacting support via email, we received a friendly, professional response in a reasonable amount of time.

Privacy and Security

IPVanish is not required to track your Internet habits because it is a US-based company. Because it is not required by law to do so, the company has made it a policy to not track user activity. You can feel secure knowing that you are not being monitored. The company does, however, keep a timestamp of your connection start time, the number of bytes transferred, and the IP address used for the session. Individual identification is impossible because IPVanish uses shared IP Addresses.

All subscribers are privy to OpenVPN encryption, the most secure available. If OpenVPN is not practical, you can utilize L2TP or 128-bit PPTP encryption. Because no logs are kept and encryption levels are high, we believe that IPVanish is one of the most secure providers available.

The IPVanish Website

The IPVanish website is professionally designed and easy to use. The information that you need is easy to find, and the pricing plans are clearly laid out.

Signing Up

You only need a valid email address and payment details to sign up for IPVanish. Once you enter these things, you are sent a confirmation email with an activation link. You can pay for your service in a variety of ways, including major credit cards, PayPal and giropay. We would like to see Bitcoin offered as an option but, as of yet, it is not included.

Once we downloaded the software, we had to do nothing but follow prompts given to us by the Installation Wizard.

The client is very easy to use; perfect for newbies to VPN software. You can select the server and protocol that you wish to use, and Ping times allow you to select the fastest server for your needs. You can customize the software with various options, and you can easily see where you appear to be surfing from.

You will notice a System Tray icon on the far left of your taskbar. Don’t let it confuse you; the icon stays green whether or not you are connected.

Supported Platforms

There are dedicated clients for both Windows and OSX provided by IPVanish. There are also setup guides that allow you to configure files for OpenVPN, L2TP and PPTP in iOS, Windows, OSX, Ubuntu and DD-WRT routers. If you know what you are doing, you can follow quick bullets. If you are unfamiliar with setting up VPN software, you can utilize the more extensive visual guides.

Conclusion

What we like about IPVanish:

No tracking or logging

Shared IP addresses

Impossibility of identifying individuals

Both TCP and UDP OpenVPN encryption

Ease of use

What we don’t like about IPVanish:

Lack of OpenVPN guide for Android

The retention of email addresses for marketing purposes

IPVanish has very little complain about. The software is easy to download, easier to install and simple to use. The company offers a fantastic service, and is dedicated to its users’ security and privacy. We readily recommend this VPN to consumers.